Introduction: Stella Dawn
Again.
That nightmare again.
For weeks she had been having the same strange nightmare. Every night the same routine: she would go to bed, then be asleep about 30 minutes later. She would find herself in a cave she didn't recognize, with only whispers from nowhere in particular. Out of nowhere, with a small flash, that strange creature would appear in front of the largest door. After that, she would wake up with heavy breathing and sweat all over her coat.
She had been having those nightmares for two, maybe three weeks, growing progressively more tired as they continued. But today would be the day she’d change that. After debating with herself whether or not tell her mother, she decided it was long overdue to tell her about it. Stella was in luck, though, for her mother was the most studious pony in all of Equestria: Twilight Sparkle.
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Stella Dawn, daughter of the Element of Magic Twilight Sparkle, was a unicorn different from the rest. In a way, you could say she was like Pinkie Pie. But instead of being the only pony with a bright, cheerful color, she was the only one in her family with a gray coat. Her mane was black, with a streak of white going through the middle. Her tail was black and white, like her mane, and straight without anything fancy. She liked to wear a watch on her foreleg, it had been gifted to her by her uncle Shining Armor and Princess Cadence. The watch served as a reminder of them. There was little remarkable about her. Her cutie mark, however, served to change that. Instead of appearing completely, the cutie mark had changed over time. It had originally appeared as a symbol with a cross, a mark she hadn’t understood upon getting it. Now, the "cross" was accompanied by four small pictures. These pictures each represented an element of nature. On top there was the picture for "Air", three lines with curves that looked like wind. On the right, there was a drop of water that represented water. At the bottom there was something akin to a rock, symbolising the earth. On the left side was a small flame, meaning fire.
Stella got those "pictures" after she manipulated the element they stood for. The first to appear was "air" when she was still a filly and in school. Her mother had been teaching her about magic and how to use it, but Stella hadn't been prepared for what had happened that day:
One day they went to the nearby lake to let their self-made boats float. Stella and her classmate had built a ship with a sail. But, much to their dismay, there wasn’t any wind that day. Defeated, they sat on their haunches, until Stella decided to use her magic to let the ship float. Normally, a unicorn would use magic on the ship to move it around, but she thought that would be too easy, and decided to use a different approach. Stella closed her eyes, and started to concentrate her magic. Then, she had begun to move the air around the sail, and surprisingly, the ship’s sail caught the now moving air and began to sail around the lake. The other fillies, that had been watching from a distance, were in awe from this display of magic. Even Stella’s own classmate couldn’t believe what she had seen, but was all the happier because of it. After Stella let her magic fade, the symbol for air had appeared on her flank, along with a cross. Several of the spectating ponies had cheered for her, but Stella had known something wasn’t quite right.
The next symbol to appear was "water". That happened years later, around the age of 15.
Stella, finally properly trained to use her magic, had been working in the park with the others from the storm team. The pegasus ponies had scheduled a storm and she had volunteered to help out, since she could snap the branches with concentrated gusts of wind, reducing the danger of twigs and branches flying around. The work progressed smoothly. Then one of the ponies working near the lake was swept off her hooves by the wind and thrown into the lake. She was drowning. Stella, hearing her cries, rushed over to see if she could help. Frantically looking left and right, she found nothing that could help the drowning pony. In her desperation, she tried the only thing she could think of: she tried to levitate the pony out of the water. But regardless how hard she tried, she couldn’t grasp the pony. Thinking back how she moved the air, she then tried something else. Concentrating on the water, she lifted the water surrounding the pony out of the lake, carrying the pony with it. Gasping for breath, the now rescued pony noticed Stella's cutie mark glowing. Stella, following the pony’s eyes, noticed that a second mark had appeared alongside the cross: a drop of water.
The earth symbol was the third to appear on her cutie mark.
Stella had received that part of her mark as she was helping Pinkie Pie’s father on his rock farm. She hadn't been thinking clearly that day, because she had gotten a nasty cold. She just took the rocks with her magic and transported them to where Mr. Pie wanted them to be. It hadn't been long until Stella noticed something: she had been levitating the rocks... she couldn't believe it. She, who hasn't been able to cast even the most mundane spell a unicorn learns, was levitating rocks around. Realising that, she felt a warm sensation on her flank, similar when she had gotten her other symbols. Stella took a look at her cutie mark, to see it had gotten another added to it, this time in the shape of a rock.
The last one she got was the fire symbol. That story wasn’t a happy one:
A few years ago, there had been a fire that destroyed half of Ponyville, leaving several ponies injured or crippled. Some ponies even died. How the fire started... nopony knows. But what was known, was that it spread quickly around town. Most ponies were able to flee to safety. Some of them got slight injuries from falling debris and some from the flames. Some weren't fast enough to get out of the burning buildings and were crushed by falling debris, or were trapped by the flames and burned alive. By the time it happened, Stella was returning from Canterlot, where she helped out Rarity in her boutique "Canterlot Finesse". Stella saw the smoke from the train she was riding, and thought about her mother and the other ponies in town. After what seemed like an eternity, the train stopped and she exited the train as fast as she could and sped into town, terrified at the sight.
Stella went to help all the ponies she could reach, but quickly noticed that if nothing was done against the fire, the whole town would be burned to the ground. In a desperate attempt she had tried to control the fire with her magic, because there wasn’t any water near her. To her surprise, she actually managed to do that. Pulling together all the flames she could reach, she formed a giant ball of fire in the air. Thankfully, the fireponies quickly came and began to extinguish the fireball. After that, she assessed the damage done to the town. 30% injured and sent to the hospital, that, thank Celestia, was spared from the flames, and the casualties were few, 15 ponies to be exact, 3 of them fillies. Exhausted, she looked back at her cutie mark, to see it once again changed. Now it was showing another symbol: a flame.
All four spots around the cross were now filled. But neither Stella nor her mother could explain the strange behaviour of her cutie mark, or her inability to use standard unicorn magic. And 7 months after the fire incedent Stella's nightmares began...